Device is the charm uh we went through John’s laptop his cell phone and and now we got his tablet and the tablet actually worked for the the live uh software that we’re using to record this uh so folks okay let me set some quick context um and then uh and then we’ll
Get John started but I guess real quickly John I should just introduce you um this is John Rubino author of the book The Money bubble uh who was founder of the website dollarcollapse.com which makes him a great guest to talk about today’s topic which is global D dollarization hey John how you doing
Hey Adam I’m I’m a little stressed out now after the last half hour of trying to get my laptop but uh yeah so sorry for the inconvenience everybody I think the uh the problem was at my end I need to buy a way better laptop it looks like but yeah
I surprised you with some new software so yeah onus is on me um but anyways John let me let me set the context here and then we’ll we’ll jump right in but thank you for persevering through all those technical difficulties to join us today because you are a great expert for today’s topic
Which of course is dedolarization which is suddenly in all the news headlines uh it’s funny enough and this week both CNN and Fox News both sides of the uh the uh you know ideological Spectrum uh in the media world uh Ren basically segments on this topic
Um and you know it’s I mean it’s a process that’s been going on for years um the world has been slowly uh starting to wean itself off the dollar here um but as you and I have talked about previously John uh the invasion of Ukraine and specifically sort of
America’s response to it by weaponizing its Financial system uh has really seemed to accelerate the process of de-dollarization here in you know over the past couple of days weeks there’s been a bunch of new trade deals that have been announced by Major countries agreeing to settle transactions in
Currencies other than dollars and these were transactions that for the past bunch of decades have only been in dollars we see a number of global central banks uh diminishing the percent of dollars and their Holdings of uh in their Reserve Holdings um so I guess the question for you here
John is is you know is this just sort of an extension of what’s been going on for the past couple of decades or is this like a new phase here where the U.S may be on its way to losing its Reserve currency status and if so
You know what’s sort of the timing of that do you think and what would the implications be that’s what we’re going to talk about here today but uh thanks so much for joining us my friend sure um thanks for having me on and you know since we’re live I need to start by
Apologizing for the barking dogs you might hear in the background that you won’t be able to edit out so that’s life but yeah actually this is uh what’s happening now is kind of um what you described both of the things you described is something that’s been a long time coming and it’s
Something that is happening very quickly all of a sudden uh and the roots of it stem from the fact that the US has been the world’s monetary power since at least the 1970s and really since after World War II and instead of being a benevolent ruler we’ve been a schoolyard
Bully you know we’ve used our monetary system and the fact that we have the world’s Reserve currency and we control the multinational financial institutions As Weapons anybody steps out of line and we’ll kick them out of the Swift uh bank settlement system or we’ll confiscate the bank accounts they have
In in New York or London or wherever or we’ll flat out invade their country and you know kill their leaders we’ve done all those things um and everybody’s aware we’ve done those things they uh you know there are still a few people in the U.S mostly people running the government now who
Still think we’re the good guys in the world uh but most of the rest of the world doesn’t see us that way they see us as um kind of a malevolent uh and not very bright um force in the world that’s causing more trouble than than problems and sexy
Um and so they’ve been waiting for a chance to break free from Dollar hegemony for a long time and you know the whole brics idea the uh Brazil Russia India and China Coalition goes all the way back to 2010 and nothing really came of it other than
China and Russia buying a bunch of gold along the way but all of a sudden and and yeah I think I think you’re right that the Ukraine war had a lot to do with it here because um basically from the point of view of most
Of the rest of the world the U.S picked that fight by forcing Russia by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders and forcing them into it and then um they uh first of all they um confiscated a bunch of Russian assets that were in banks in Europe and they
Fed so much money and so many arms into the Ukraine that the war has gone on a lot longer than was expected and you know the attempt is to drain Russia dry and basically take them off the chessboard so everybody sees this and they they’re thinking well God if Russia
You know if this could happen to Russia then who’s next are they going to come after me next so it’s becoming a lot easier for different countries to justify breaking away from these rules that we’ve had in the past where you could only buy oil with dollars and most
International Trade had to take place in dollars and and your Central Bank Reserves had to be mostly in dollars and you know that’s true anymore all of a sudden and we’re seeing a number of really dramatic things happen right now and um let me stop there and then we’ll get
On to the dramatic things as we go along okay well look um I think both you and I had sort of pulled data in advance of this conversation of some of the announcements that have been made recently um just to give people a sense of you know which specific countries are
Involved and what decisions they’re they’re taking here um I guess do you want to start with your list first you want to go through mine um I don’t know if you still have yours in front of you given the scramble that we had before but yeah yeah I printed it
Out I’ve got it right here because you know there’s so many names here that you can’t really keep all of this um in memory just because so many countries have all of a sudden decided to either join the brics Coalition or or are talking about it or are cutting other
Trade deals on the side and and so first of all the the two big names that have applied to join the bricks are two really serious names Saudi Arabia which is the um the biggest oil exporter in the world and the country that is basically um responsible for the whole Petro
Dollar dominance in in the past 30 or 40 years and back in the 1970s we cut a deal with them in which we agreed to basically make them impregnable we were we were going to protect them no matter what and all they had to do was refuse to take any other currencies except
Dollars for their oil and that made the dollar the one indispensable currency and that’s basically held until just lately where now Saudi Arabia is joining effectively an anti-dollar Coalition and is um is making it known that it’s willing to take other currencies in return for its uh uh for its oil which
Means basically the petrodollar is dead the other big name is Mexico I mean Mexico is is right here it’s basically in a lot of ways our manufacturing base demographically Mexico is in the perfect place um for a U.S partnership because they’ve got a young hard-working population
Which very few other countries do uh and uh they’re they’re very productive you know we can set up a factory there um that that’s part of the onshoring or friends Shoring Trend now where you bring back your Manufacturing um to your own chores hope for the U.S we really like to bring
It back to Mexico in a lot of cases because it’s way cheaper to produce there and it’s perceived as safe well now Mexico is joining this um this Coalition that is not friendly to the U.S and the dollar uh and there’s a bunch of other countries too but uh
You know you get a sense of how big this is when um when these two countries that we kind of thought we had in our pocket are now definitely out of pocket and are definitely doing things that uh that can’t help but hurt the dollar in the intermediate term and definitely the
Long term all right John if I can just Probe on both those for a quick sec so I mentioned that um CNN and Fox News both ran segments on this in the past like 24 hours in the fox segment they had former assistant treasury secretary Monica Crowley and
Um she basically said if we indeed lose the Petro dollar that that would have quote catastrophic implications um she basically sort of talked about an implosion of Financial and economic implosion resulting from that and of course a loss of Reserve currency status and all that so she was
You know she wasn’t beating around the bush there she said that was kind of like a nuclear event for America if indeed the Petra dollar is lost and my understanding of the petrodollar deal that was struck with Saudi Arabia was was that hey um we will fund your defense Saudi
Arabia so you you basically are going to be protected by the the military Shield uh in might of the U.S um so if if Saudi Arabia is potentially breaking the Petro dollar I’m just curious do you have any idea of how they’re going to supplement you know if the US gets angry
And and then for therefore retracts its military protection do they know who’s going to step up and fill that Gap well um that is well probably the third biggest story in in this overall story here so far in China just broker to peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran
And Iran was the big risk for Saudi Arabia those uh they’re on two different sides of the uh the debate within Islam about how that religion should be run and they’ve been at each other’s throats forever and if they’re going to make peace and they’re going to partner with China
As part of this process then Saudi Arabia really doesn’t need the us as protection because um its main enemy is now its friend and it’s got China over there helping it build things and uh you know create a manufacturing base or at least buy a lot of oil whatever um
So not only has Saudi Arabia killed the petragauler but it’s it’s basically you know to an extent pushed the us us out of the Middle East you know what’s our role there if Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t want us there and their partners with China it’s not clear
What we’re doing over there anymore because Iraq is sort of um an Iranian I don’t want to say puppet state that’s too much but uh that they um are in a position where Iran has a lot of influence within Iraq so you take them off the table and you know what’s
The what’s the point of a U.S presence in the Middle East other than um guaranteeing Israel’s security and that doesn’t have much to do with oil in the long run so so yeah Saudi Arabia has has basically cut a series of deals that um that makes the U.S unnecessary there and that’s an
Earthquake the the woman you were quoting um didn’t overstate the um the stakes here because if you take if you take the Petro dollar out of the equation then a lot of other countries no longer need to hold as many dollars as they currently do because they don’t necessarily need them
To buy oil they can maybe use their own currencies or some other currency of the currency of another country to do it um and what happens to those dollars well they they’re probably in the form of Treasury bonds treasury paper um with the Central Bank in a given
Country and that Central Bank is liable to lower the Dollar’s role in there for an exchange reserves by selling a lot of Treasury bonds which does two things it pushes up interest rates and lowers the exchange rate of the dollar so this is uh you know to say
It’s an attack on the dollar is probably overstating it but it’s definitely putting downward pressure on the value of the dollar and is forcing us to live within our means you know we we’re the biggest debtor country in the world right now and we um we borrow what
Between one and three trillion dollars a year just to get by and if all of a sudden we have to take say you know half of that borrowing and do away with it and start finding a way to actually fund the the global Military Empire the Cradle of the Grave um
Um entitlement State and the trillion dollars a year in interest that we have to pay on the debt that we’ve taken on already then that’s a very big deal that’s that’s a massive cut in U.S living standards um in a country that’s already wildly over leveraged so you know it’s kind of
Like the Ponzi scheme story where it can function the Ponzi scheme can function as long as there’s a lot of new money coming in but you turn off that spigot and the Ponzi scheme collapses immediately so we are we’re not in the worst shape in in terms of of debt and financial
Fragility in the world but we still have our massive fragilities you know we saw in the last week what happens if if a couple of little Regional Banks get into trouble uh that required the government to basically guarantee all Bank deposits across the country and and you know that
Wasn’t even a big crisis so uh this is going to lead to bigger Financial crises and you can’t know what they are ahead of time but there’s a lot of uh there’s a lot of things on the list of potential Financial crises that could flow from um U.S interest rates being pushed up
And the dollars value being pushed down and that that appears to be what we’re looking at it’s not clear how that changes now because everybody in in the world has basically found out that they can get away with this you know um India can get away with buying
Russian oil for rupees for instance uh and the us is going to complain a little bit but we’re not going to invade India we’re not going to send the CIA and try to destabilize their their government and they see that now and so they’re free to do what they want and what they
Want is unfavorable for the U.S so there there’s our decade you know the world’s kind of like on a on a playground when everybody just decides to turn their backs on the bully you know the bully doesn’t have anybody to play with after that and is kind of wondering what
Happened and why it’s happening and I think the U.S is in kind of that spot the guy’s in charge of the country still think they’re the good guys and uh and still think that five percent of the world’s population should be able to control the other 95 and you
Know they’re finding out in a hard way that none of that is true and I I don’t think they’re going to take it well so um you know regime change tends to happen quickly right where everybody sort of you know kowtows to whoever’s in charge up until the moment that they no
Longer fear them right use your bully analogy right and then all of a sudden the power Dynamic shifts and you have a new regime going forward right so is this like are we are we witnessing a watershed moment here or are these just sort of like cracks in the dam but the
Dam hasn’t yet fully burst open um the cracks just started forming recently and they’re getting bigger at an accelerating rate so it it could be that we look back on this as the the month that the dam broke we’ll have to see how fast things progress from here but um but it’s clear
To almost everybody that they don’t have to worry about the us so much anymore you know in that sense the uh Ukraine war actually backfired because it was designed by NATO um which the US is in charge of to drain Russia and to make them into relevancy
In geopolitics and it kind of had the opposite effect it’s draining us we’re spending a ton of money on Ukraine we’re sending them you know a lot of military gear that we could use for other things presumably uh and it’s making us irrelevant while Russia is still finding
Plenty of buyers for its oil it’s it’s not in that bad a shape financially and it’s gaining more Partners all the time so it looks like um and you know and sometimes when when there’s a war that shows and an Empire to be a paper tiger you
Know that happens a lot in history where everybody’s terrified of you know the British Naval power or whatever and and um or in this case U.S financial slash military power and it turns out that uh those things aren’t the overwhelmingly unbeatable things that we thought they were and then everything changes so this
This could be the point in history when that happens to the US Empire and you know it really depends on how we respond to that it could be for instance the British Empire just kind of faded into um second tier power status without fighting a gigantic War um in order to maintain power
Um and the U.S could you know take some steps back and end up being one of the powers in a multi-polar world which isn’t so bad you know to be a strong player on a strong team is a good way to be in or we could try to reassert our authority over all
Of these guys who are running off doing their own things which I think is what a lot of the neocon Psychopaths who are running the US government would like to do they would literally like to fight World War III against Russia and China because they think that they’ll win
Quote-unquote you know how you win a world war against two nuclear Powers is uh is not clear but I think there are a lot of people who are pulling the strings in the Bible Administration who would basically love to see that and and so we don’t know what their their plans
Are and we don’t know what their ability to carry out those plans will be so we’re not out of the woods you know in other words we’re not um guaranteed a peaceful transition from a unimpolar world to a multi-polar world it could be very bloody it could be
Chaotic and we’ll just have to see because so much of what’s going to happen is going to be decided by people who don’t really understand their situation sitting around a conference table making decisions under extreme stress and so really Anything Could Happen from here on out but we just have
To pray that that um that the transition is reasonably peaceful and that it’s not a financial catastrophe or a God forbid a geopolitical catastrophe in the next five years as we get from here to wherever it is we’re going Adam I lost you there I can’t hear you can you hear me
Yeah I’m sorry I was on mute there um uh so if this turns out to be a watershed event um I’m not saying necessarily this is the year that U.S you know loses its its dollar hegemony but you said it could be uh but but for assuming for a second it was um
You know you said sort of everybody has been uh everybody else around the world you know has been sort of um looking forward to this moment where they’re a little bit less under the thumb of the dollar um but one one group of people that I
Think this would come as a huge shock to is Americans right I mean it’s like this is a topic that I think the average American has not had on their radar until potentially this week all of a sudden and if it ended up being that Watershed event it would really be like a
You know like a two by four to the side of the head of the average American of like wait a minute what we just had you know world currency dominance and then all of a sudden now we’re we’re you know we don’t um and you know as you said there’s a
Lot of potential implications that really come from that right I mean if there’s less need and desire to own dollars well then it’s going to be harder to sell treasuries cost to Capital here is going to go up um the value of the dollar is going to
Go down and one of the things one of the you know the great advantages that we had had by having the world’s Reserve currency is we could largely export our inflation right we could make a lot more dollars spend them benefit from that and the
Rest of the world had to kind of you know deal with the inflation as it as it rippled out uh into the rest of the world um we will lose the ability to do that going forward so I mean this this really will have pretty seismic effects uh for
The average American if indeed you know the world continues to accelerate uh the weeding of itself off the dollars off of dollars um I I assume you kind of agree with all this John right oh yeah yeah I mean we can’t know the the details of this transition
But in general terms it’s really inflationary for America yeah exactly like we know the trends that’ll kick off we don’t know yet how the exact magnitude but we yeah we can kind of have a sense of where things are going to be heading because because remember the um the brics Coalition has its
Coalescing you know with all the other the other countries that are joining or wanting to join um is going to have control over commodity pricing and so we’ll have the equivalent of OPEC but not just for oil it’ll be for a lot of other crucial Commodities that the US
Needs and if the guys who are selling those things are in charge of pricing then prices are going to be higher than they would be otherwise so that’s that’s very inflationary for um just about any sector of American life you know manufacturing for sure is going to cost more going forward because
We can’t dictate prices um and that alone I mean let’s say commodity prices um um give us seven or eight percent inflation Which is less than we had in 2022 but if it’s that level of inflation going forward that’s incredibly destructive for a currency because once people figure out that we can’t really
Control the um the decline in the value of the currency or that it’s our it’s our official policy to engineer that kind of a decline uh then people just lose faith in the currency you get the crack up boom from the Austrian School of Economics everybody just gives up on the
Currency and dumps it and it you know it could be and we were always heading for something like that because we were borrowing so much money that uh there was going to be no way out except to do a massive Currency Reset because uh um financing all this debt was going to be
Inflationary well now we have this other Factor besides all the debt that we’ve taken on which is going to be inherently destabilizing and inherently inflationary um we’ve got the rest of the world now in control of big parts of the Commodities complex and we’re going to
Have to pay more than we would have otherwise so yeah it’s uh it’s going to be one of those multi-crisis scenarios where it’s not just one thing going on it’s a lot of things and by the way there’s a couple of science fiction books by a writer named William Gibson
Who um that that’s the world he sketches out convosed two books and they call it the jackpot world where um you know how you’re playing a uh a slot machine and it comes up one thing you know one pineapple two pineapples three pineapples well and then it’s jackpot well that world
Has all the crises that we’ve been talking about for a long time happen all at once there’s a war at a geopolitical crisis and and the financial crisis an environmental thing and and you know we’re kind of headed for something like that where a lot of things can go wrong all at once
And um it’s really not clear in those books 80 of the human population is wiped out and the uh the people that are around afterwards are basically ruled by what they call kleptocrats in other words a um an oligopoly of extremely rich people who can do anything they want to because
They’ve got the good Tech and they’ve got all the money so that sort of sounds like the world economic forum’s best case scenario but so we’re heading for something like that and you know throw in the fact that there’s a large number of Elites in this world who would actually like to see
Massive depopulation in a hurry um and um an oligopolistic class rise to um to basically dominate the global economy so yeah we’re kind of heading in some very disturbing directions now and again you know the details are impossible to predict six months out or a year or out or whatever but it
Certainly looks like the broader um the the broader scenario is for these Fiat currencies to finally stop working and to be replaced by some kind of a currency regime that’s based on Commodities that limits government’s ability to uh to just inflate themselves military Empires and and cradle the grave entitlement States
Um but get from here to there there’s got to be a series of big crises and I think that’s what we’re heading into right now and the the whole brics thing um is gonna be one of the determinants of how fast this thing happens and uh
You know that we can’t know but it looks like um it looks like like you said the dam is breaking it’s completely possible that this is one of those slowly at first then all at once kinds of scenarios and the dollar is one of the victims of the um the the
Fulfilling of this process interesting um got so many different places to take this and and folks as well I I neglected to mention at the beginning of this if you’re watching live we’ll leave some minutes at the end here for me to grab a couple of questions uh from the live
Chat so we will give a few you uh as many as we can grab an opportunity to ask questions here um all right John um so I’m gonna I’m gonna try to help people pull their heads out of the oven here um after your Rosie view what may happen
Here but it’s interesting you and I have been talking about the everything bubble for a long time right and I I could hear what you’re saying is is the everything bubble may end up uh morphing or metastasizing into the uh everything everywhere all at once crisis right
Yeah yeah I mean we’re not just one single crisis though a different crises in different places Each of which would be seen as existential when it happens if it just happens by itself but you know we could easily have a banking crisis across the developed world we could easily have um commercial real
Estate tank Pension funds tank governments be unable to finance themselves all of the stuff could happen at the same time and of course war is an ever-present Danger in this kind of a situation because even even without um you know the the us being run by some really strange bloodthirsty people
Um it’s normal during a crisis for a country to look abroad for an enemy that they can use to distract the people from the domestic mismanagement that’s going on right or into the news or to make a play for resources is some think that’s why Russia was really going after uh
Into Ukraine was to secure some Key Resources um all right well look I’ve got a couple of key questions I want to make sure we get on the plate here before I tap the audience one is um uh let’s see which one to start with first um
Uh so uh you you you mentioned that um we’re going to have this sort of brics Coalition uh that is going to increasingly control the the production of commodity Global Commodities right and it’s going to be harder for the U.S and the west or what I like to call sort
Of Team America uh to get it’s gonna be yeah more expensive to but for them to buy and and it’s and part of that’s going to be because it’s going to be the supply is going to be more constrained than we’ve been used to right so forever we’ve been used to
Buying everything with dollars and um being able to basically outbid the rest of the world for whatever Commodities we wanted um as Zoltan Posner um the Credit Suisse analyst uh has been saying the supply of global Commodities is becoming increasingly encumbered meaning it’s being promised by like one brick
Nation to another brick nation and so when America shows up and says Okay I want to buy them they’re saying okay but you know um we might not have everything you want to buy America and maybe someday it’s going to be and we might not even take dollars
For it we’re not there yet but that that that’s where things could go um a a pushback I’ve sort of heard about this is people say hey like let’s talk about the countries you’re talking about here China Russia you know like these are not countries that people have a lot of
You know Decades of history of trustworthy Behavior with and it’s sort of like the honor among Thieves argument right which is like are these guys going to really be able to hang together as a Coalition in the long run um or you know are they going to be
Opportunistic and kind of stabbing each other in the back when they can to get a better deal and whatnot and is this something that might look like a a compelling Confederation to to counterbalance the dollar but in reality and in practice it might kind of fracture over time because it it’s just
Not a team of of allies who can really count on each other um especially maybe if America starts switching from guns to butter you know in terms of its international relations well yeah the idea of a multi-polar world is uh it is is not something that
Ought to be peaceful and um and you know lack drama because uh when you’ve got three or four different powers out there and it’s not clear who’s the dominant one and they they’re all run by people with very powerful Egos and and a real desire to make that country you know
It’s going to be messy um and you could make the case that um a unipolar world where you just have one kind of dictator out there like like we have had up until just lately with the us as the world’s policeman that for all its faults it’s actually a better system but um
You know a unipolar system does have faults and eventually it breaks down and um a multi-polar system is more normal for the world because there there’s no way that one country should dominate all these other countries and the only alternative to that is coalitions which is what we had until very recently you
Know the uh for instance in Europe you had Britain and Prussia um and France as these three dominant Powers but none of them wanted any two of them to to be able to dominate so so Britain would basically come in on the side of whoever was the
Weakest of those three and try to maintain a balance of power that way um and in a multi-polar world that’s kind of what happens you get a lot of jockeying for influence and shifting alliances and stuff like that and yeah it’s it’ll be very messy and the guys
Who will end up with power you know Russia and China for instance they’re not nice guys and there’s no reason to think that they’re going to be peaceful um Partners in every way in every situation going forward so it’s going to be messy for sure um but it’s inevitable there’s no way
The U.S was going to continue to run the world without uh fighting a nuclear World War III with the other Rising powers that would that just uh you know that could still happen but in the absence of that right their lips knock on wood it doesn’t yes
I thought the world was better than that you know and those are our real too Alternatives having the U.S um just stay in charge without having to fight for it is is highly unlikely so the the world of the future where we have uh you know maybe
India and a coalition of the global South for instance and then the brics countries uh in Eurasia being the dominant power and then the US and the Americas being a dominant power and those three groups all trying to um to maintain peace with each other you know trying to um
Um trying to get what they can without starting some kind of world war and and you know there’s no guarantee you succeed when when you do something like that it didn’t work for Europe they ended up with two world wars and uh it’s completely possible that war is part of
The future but it’s also um you know it’s also that’s how it is there’s not going to be a world in which um humans are peaceful animals and we never cause trouble and we never are greedy and we’re never Territorial and we are just those things uh and that
Always translates to a national and a multinational level we’re just those kinds of creatures so the world will be messy and these coalitions that are forming now might not hold we just can’t know that but the fact that we’re heading in that direction is pretty much undeniable we’re going to form other coalitions
That challenge um nato in the U.S and there will be a you know a measure of success for the new guys as they come along because they’ve got a lot of resources that give them a chance of succeeding and there’s going to be a lot
Of setbacks for the old guard for the US and and Europe especially so that’s all going to happen it’s gonna be incredibly messy and uh you’re right though this is uh it’s a depressing um Prospect if that’s all the further that we take it but it’s also an
Investment thesis you know this kind of a world is one in which you can make a lot of money if you um if you position yourself so that you’re in the Stream that’s moving furthest and fastest in other words if you own the right things at the right time it’s a
Ton of money to be made and I think you know the commodity complex is a an interesting place to be right now because it looks like their prices are going to be pushed out and it looks like say a Mining stock that has good reserves in a in a fairly stable locality
Um is going to see its margins just blow out and because of that it’ll be a good investment so the question is you know which gold and silver Miner should we own which oil companies which uranium companies uh these things are going to be huge winners and they’re going to make life-changing money
For a lot of people and we just have to figure out the timing and then the specific companies and that’s an interesting intellectual challenge that that if you get it right it can make you a lot of money so if you focus on that instead of all the crazy
Stuff that’s going to make Commodities become more valuable then then it’s easier to not be depressed by all of this you know you keep keep the prize in in mind which is a lot of extra capital for you at some point in the future and uh and you can approach this with an
Open mind and sleep at night okay so um I’m trying to find a uh a chart that you sent over this morning John so I can show it up here and it’s the price of the the ratio of the s p to Commodities uh which I think really proves your point
Um I’ll pull it up in just a second but yeah as we as we wrap up here that one but I’ll I’ll put it up on the screen so everybody can see it clearly um so uh uh I I wanna I wanna ask you to expound on
How to get the timing right and and where to be looking and how to identify some of these you know potentially great um commodity-based plays um on our way to that answer could I ask you to address two things um one is we’re talking about D dollarization and other currencies you
Know uh stepping in to replace the dollar in trade and whatnot um right now it’s still an all Fiat world right um you mentioned that the brics Coalition may eventually introduce a currency that is backed by Commodities so if you could just opine for a moment
About you know in this mix are we also potentially seeing I want to say the death of Fiat but but a a competing currency that is not Fiat emerging and then secondly um if you expect the dollar to weaken here for all the reasons we just talked about
Men you would really expect to see gold is priced in dollars really start to shoot the moon and gold has found some footing here right it’s back at about 2 000 bucks an ounce right now um but I would think if the world really began thinking
That what you said is likely to happen would happen we’d start seeing the gold price priced in dollars really start running away now um we haven’t maybe it’s just a matter of time so I’d love to get your thoughts on on Gold’s reaction to what we’re talking about here too
Well yeah gold gold wins twice one is that um people might be setting up commodity-based currencies where gold is part of a vacuum and the other is that people are going to be terrified by the instability of the financial World especially for the the old PL currencies
Like the dollar in the euro and they’re going to want to buy things that provide safety and gold is the you know that’s the main thing you do when you’re terrified you buy a bunch of gold and that is a very tiny little door to get through for the amount of global
Investable Capital that’s out there there’s 30 some trillion dollars of Global investment Capital that uh and that works the amount of goal that’s available in the world because remember the uh I think there’s like 10 trillion dollars worth of gold but most of it is in Central Bank vaults so it’s not
Available so the amount of gold that you could get if you’re somebody who is suddenly terrified and wants to convert a bunch of dollars or Euros or yen to Gold there’s not going to be that much out there and you know just in the last few years we’ve seen all kinds of
Different assets capture people’s imagination and then just go parabolic and there’s no reason why gold can’t do a GameStop or a Bitcoin or something like that just can’t suddenly capture people’s imagination and suddenly be bid to the Moon uh and if we were going to do something like
Back for instance the US dollar with gold in order to save it from Just spiraling down into the abyss and disappearing uh and we were going to back maybe 40 of outstanding dollars with gold that would take um ten thousand dollars gold ten thousand dollars an ounce gold and maybe
A lot more there are estimates running up into the 20 and 30 000 announce range um so yeah but but do you do you see the us having to intervene and begin to reback the currency with something like old as as probable in in the Arc of what you see coming
Well the U.S has to do something it can’t stay on this course and so the question is what we’ll do and the the least painful thing for it to do I mean a lot of guys in charge of the US government right now would like to just
Go out and take all the Commodities that that we need to back the dollar uh assuming we don’t do that then the the monetary reset scenario is the thing that makes the most sense and that’s that’s incredibly painful for anybody that trusts the government and
Holds a lot of dollars but it’s the the least painful scenario Um otherwise and what you do is then yeah you just go back to some kind of a gold backing which is was the dominant monetary system for most of human history all the way up into 1971. currencies were backed and therefore their supply work was controlled by
Um a relationship with gold and if we just went back to that we’d have to do it with a massive dollar devaluation but that would give us a a stable monetary system again and so you know if these guys have an ounce of common sense when the crisis really gets going that’s the
Scenario that’s the solution that they’ll look for so yeah I could see the dollar um if at that time were run by rational people um the back on some kind of a commodity standard probably gold but maybe you know a big basket of other communities something like that so it’s completely
Possible assuming for a second it’s gold we just get this question all the time so I’m gonna I’m gonna front run the questions which is um if Government if the US government were to do that folks think back to Franklin Roosevelt um where he basically you know sort of
Forced people to sell their gold back to the government would you see something similar or or would you not because right now gold isn’t money well um isn’t U.S money yeah I mean it’s it’s completely possible that if we went back to something like a gold standard that the
Government would try to take the gold away from people and that’s just you know that’s just how we roll here in the U.S we uh we have no trouble with authoritarian Solutions if we can get away with it um or do you think it would be a um like
Like back in the 30s like it would be a sale okay we’re repricing gold you know we’ll give you the whatever rate for gold but there’s going to be a that’s the carrot the stick is if we find you have it and you didn’t give it to us you’re going to prison
Yeah yeah back then they uh they said well yeah we’ll pay you the old exchange rate for it and uh and some people handed in their gold most people did not most people back then just kept their gold you know because it’s really hard to figure out I mean how do the police
Find out if you have um some gold in a coffee can buried in your backyard that’s right I mean that’s one of the beauties of it yeah yeah yeah um now but when that happens if you don’t turn your gold in you become a criminal so that’s something you need to think
Through because um you know you’re breaking the laws of your country and presumably there’s going to be a penalty that’s commensurate with how serious the government is about this whole thing so the solution for that is to uh definitely own some gold but own more silver than gold because silver is an
Industrial commodity it can’t really be confiscated because the solar panel guys will um you know buy a bunch of congressmen and have that rule change in a heartbeat and um so silver will tend to go up maybe even more than gold in the kind of scenarios we’re talking about and it will be
Useful as money you’ll be able to go to the farmer’s market with an ounce of silver and get all the veggies you need per month when when the time comes um so that’s a solution that I think makes a lot of sense in this world if we’re
Worried about going back to a gold standard and confiscation and and um you know ownership being made illegal things like that well just focus on Silver and you’ll be um you’ll be mostly immune to government interference and you’ll still be able to use when the time comes that can be a
Function kind of money for you whereas gold is a little tougher because if an ounce of gold is ten thousand dollars you’re not taking that to a farmer’s market or anything even though ten thousand dollars won’t be what it used to be but still it’s harder to use it’s
Like trying to spend a thousand dollar bill now it’s tougher but silver is going to be the the equivalent of the you know hundred dollar bill yeah and much easier to use and and the mining stocks may make sense in this scenario too I mean one if gold gets repriced
Upwards obviously the mining stocks would would get repriced upwards by some multiple because they’re a leveraged play but also you know it it’s not confiscatable so unless the government were to nationalize the minds you know you’d be able to to to have exposure to the upside in Gold without having to
Worry about some sort of confiscation of your your asset correct you yeah at least for a big part of this process towards the end there could be windfall profits taxes on mining companies that are making a lot of money and which which lowers the value of their stocks
Or there could be flat out nationalization like you said so the um the mining stocks I I would say would be something that you ride until things get really scary and maybe authoritarian then you sell them and then you go into physical stuff you know you buy a piece of farmland or you
Convert to silver coins or gold coins or whatever and you buy things that are harder for governments to get at because um it’s no trouble for a government to um to see that gold miners are making record profits and their stocks are going through the roof and come in and
Say well why should you have all those profits when everybody else is suffering we’re just gonna that’s easy for a government to rationalize right I mean and very recently we were hearing murmurs for doing that with the oil companies right yeah yeah I don’t I don’t think it actually became any
Legislation unless I’m forgetting something but for a while there it was definitely being trial balloons in Congress right yeah yeah and if oil had stayed high if oil had gone to 200 a barrel and stayed there for a couple of years it would have been uh probably Unstoppable the government would have
Come after those profits somehow which is you know it so defeats the purpose of having markets when you do something like that because what what prices are that prices are basically a signaling mechanism that tells entrepreneurs and um other companies what to do with their Capital so when something goes up it
Tells you to go get more of it so if oil would go to 200 a barrel yes that would be painful for a couple of years but it would also lead to massive exploration and development on the part of the oil companies which would uh produce all the
Oil that we would need and prices would go back down and that’s just how markets work so when you interfere with them the way governments do you kind of hamstring the whole concept of capitalism which is what we have now you know the price of money is controlled by the government
And all kinds of other um like bailouts and things like that or things are happening but uh that basically um interfere with the pricing mechanism so that nobody knows how to allocate Capital so we get mile investment so we have all these future bankruptcies that we’re just building into the system now and
Um the whole windfall profits thing falls into that category but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t do it they probably will so when you’re most excited about your mining stocks that’s the time to look around and see what the political situation is becoming and then decide whether now is the time to take
The profits that you’ve uh you’ve got and move into something that’s harder to steal and so like I said it’s an interesting intellectual challenge because you you not only need to make the right bets you need to make them at the right time right and then you need to shift gears
At the right time too so to to do this right you’ve got to be a uh uh a political scientist to expect you got to know what’s coming from these big incompetent panicked governments at any given time and uh you know that’s that’s interesting theater to watch all of this
Stuff and if you’ve got money on the line that makes it even more interesting so I think it’s possible this is going to be for a lot of people um it’s going to be an entertaining time you know it’ll be scary but um the stakes will be high enough and your
Control over your situation will be real so you’ll you’ll be empowered and you’ll be excited I think this could be a fun time for the people who who don’t trust the world’s governments you know those guys uh they’re lost there’s nothing that we can really do for them
Who see clearly mistrust the people in charge and are willing to bet against them this is a time to make a ton of money you know watch the movie Big Short The Big Short that could happen on um you know various scales um for millions of people out there if
People are paying attention all right well look John first off open invitation to come back here uh anytime over the unfolding you know next couple years as as you see things you know as you see it identify opportunities given where you know the puck is heading in all this
Um you know if I into it from your comments it sounds like you’re saying look if you’re if you’re just kind of like a a good citizen and just sort of move with the herd where the government’s telling you you’re probably going to end yourself find yourself up
In the sort of you know Financial slaughterhouse at some point but for the people that poke their head UPS above the herd and are willing to bolt uh when they see opportunity um they can actually maybe make some fantastic returns in a type of market
Like this let me just put up this chart real quickly so people get a chance to see it that we referenced earlier um and then John I’m going to start taking some questions from the audience um but I will ask you um real quick before I do just to give
Any counsel you have for people that are are excited by your sense of hey you know there is a chance to make some good money here if you look at at some of these sectors that you were talking about if you could just sort of share your process for how you identify what
Good opportunities are in the mining sector and some of these other commodity sectors um but real quick let me just show this chart it’s from Marin katusa um I think he calls this the most important chart uh ever or of the decade something like that and what this is is
It’s an index of Commodities versus the S P 500 you know a proxy for the General market and you’ll see that at times of of great uh scarcity or shortage or crisis uh commodity is a big value a big premium was placed on them those are the
The red Peaks you see here on the chart um we are down now at a level um basically the past you know couple years have been the lowest since the 70s in fact uh they’re even higher than the 70s War you see that things have ticked up a little bit here
Um but still even though they have we are at a generational low in this chart and so this really is the opportunity which is if you want to buy low and sell High we are in the Buy Low period for a lot of key Commodities uh and John just made
You know a great uh argument in this this whole discussion about how Commodities are going to kind of be you know that that’s going to be the axis that the world economy uh revolves around going forward from here and uh you know the the West enjoyed first
Access uh and uh you could kind of you know demand its price that error is ending and so for those of us in the west at least um you know Commodities are probably going to become a lot more dear than we have been used to
Um over the past you know I don’t know what this is this is my lifetime 50 years yeah that is your lifetime right there right and it’s awesome right there exactly I was I was born like three weeks before Nixon took the dollar off uh the gold one you shut the gold window
Yeah humans on Earth you know before who who lived under a quote gold standard dollar yeah yeah it’s your your lifetime and the Fiat Dollar’s Lifetime on that chart right there and you know what that chart shows is that um um if you had shorted stocks and gone
Long Commodities when when they were at their lows you made a ton of money in a very short period of time and we are at another one of those inflection points so if history repeats as it has for the last three big Financial Cycles uh then there’s your
Play you know load up on Commodities and just ride them up and then that you know once you’ve got the the broad scenario and the sector um taking care of then you start picking specific Commodities and specific mining stocks and other related companies within the Commodities that you like
Best within the broad sector that you like best and um and and so you’ve got a lot of work to do besides just deciding that Commodities are the thing to be in but um but you’re definitely on the right side of history at this point based on the fairly recent past so
Um yeah I think that a ton of money will be made if history repeats and it’s you know it’s right there willing to be taken and the only question is you want to go really aggressive and short stocks at the same time you’re going on Commodities because that would have been
The play and um that you know there’s a lot to be said for that possibility if you’re uh reasonably financially sophisticated and uh and risk tolerant then you can do a lot of really interesting long short combinations in a world like this where stocks are wildly overvalued and commodities are wildly undervalued but
Even if not you know just buy the uh the best commodity related stocks and then just ride them up so um that is a very optimistic chart right there because it tells you pretty much exactly what you got to do to make an extremely large amount of money in a
Reasonably short time so um yeah that’s a good starting point for almost anybody all right so for people who um here I’ll pull up Tom’s question here um but let’s say people who aren’t um that John I know you fellow the precious metals mining sector for a long
Time so you have a basket at the Port of companies that you have researched and put together but again you’ve been following the space for decades right so for somebody that doesn’t have at least yet your your background of experience what do you think is the best way for
Them to get started should they be buying the ETFs should they just be buying like the top tier players in the sector um or should they be maybe subscribing to a newsletter of somebody who has decades worth of experience and is cultivating like a top 10 type of list
Well there are different ways of approaching this and one is if you if you just want the exposure and um and you’re not all that interested in really you know sitting down and learning a bunch of stuff about say uranium stocks or something like that then you can just
Buy a well-run ETF and that’ll do it that’ll give you the exposure to that sector but you’ll get the winners and the losers in that ETF you’re captured debate right yes yeah and um so you know with something like that chart you just showed um just the overall progress of the
Sector is good enough you know if that’s what you have and it goes up eight times in 10 years that’s you’re one of the best investors in the world just from doing that right oh that’s the easy simple way of getting exposure and then just going on with your life make
Sure you look into the the quality of the ETFs that you buy and they should be fairly big they should be run by companies that have a presence in the financial world and um if you want to dig a little further you can go into the uh the perspectives
And make sure that they um they don’t have any landmines in there that let them screw you over and get away with it um now the next way to do it is to um to yeah sign up for a newsletter or something like that there are people in
In all the commodity spaces who have been publishing new newsletters for a long time and who have a record of finding the uh you know the Diamonds in the Rough in the sector that go up not eight times but 80 times or something so um One winner
If you get it from a newsletter more than pays for the cost of the newsletter and I think that’s a great way first of all to educate yourself and second of all to find the unusual stocks in the sector you know you you uh don’t have to
Buy Exxon if you want to be an oil there’s lots of like mid-tier oil companies that you’ve never heard of that that might go up three or four times as much as Exxon in good times for oil and the um I’m doing kind of something like that with myself stack which is a
Rubino.substack.com uh and then the um it’s a newsletter that is geared towards actionable stuff you know how do you like that John good thank you I appreciate that but uh but yeah um we’re setting up portfolios of commodity related stocks and looking at how to short different things and
Whether it makes sense you know I’m trying to figure out how to short Japan right now and uh I haven’t found a lot of stuff that really is worthy of a post an entire post but uh but that’s one that’s one that’s coming as soon as I figure
Out the right ways you can bet against Japan with all of their financial problems that that would be a good thing to try to do um and uh you know the final thing is to uh after you’ve done the newsletter thing you’ve kind of educated yourself then really start doing your own
Research really dig into these things and figure out which who you know little companies you want to watch the CEOs videos of and and you want to do the financial analysis and keep up with their um their um news reports and everything and um that’s fun too because once you uh
You know once you have 20 or 30 little stocks that other people don’t know about you kind of get attached to them so they become kind of sort of your family and get a few of them right and they can make you a lot of money so you can
Basically start from the extremely lazy but also pretty effective part of the the Spectrum and just buy some ETFs or go all the way out to uh you know digging into it and becoming kind of uh your own personal expert on things yeah I I would I would caution people that
To get to that end State you want to draft off of experts beforehand right you want to you want to look over someone’s shoulder or you want to you know understand why the researchers are picking the stocks they are and like you over time as you get more and more
Experience then you you know can kind of start being your own portfolio manager I want to caution people one thing they tend to do is they might like subscribe to somebody’s newsletter for a month right to get the top 10 picks and then they put them in their
Portfolio and then they think I’ll just own those stocks the thing is in a lot of these for a lot of these companies especially the smaller ones um you know there’s a lot that changes like I said let’s take a precious metals minor right if if you’re like an
Explorer or developer right you know there’s new drill results that come in you know there’s uh something might happen with Machinery or there’s a new you know shaft that collapses and needs to be rebuilt or whatever but there are things that can happen that can really change the prospects of the company one
Way or another so these are not necessarily like set it and forget it stocks if you put them in your portfolio you really do have to keep up with them news and all that type of stuff um looks like we just lost John hopefully he’ll jump back on in a minute
Um but just to finish my point here folks um you know it there’s a real risk if you take that um yeah I’m just going to subscribe for one month and get their picks and then I’ll just put it in my portfolio and I’ll just forget about it
Um because they’re so Dynamic you know something that looks like a great company one day can maybe in a month or two looked like not a great company because again something like that drill results might have come in or something like that um while we’re waiting for John to come
Back if he’s able to come back um I do want to remind folks that um uh we had the wealthy on conference two weeks ago and uh Rick rule gave just an incredible presentation at that conference where he shared over 30 individual stock tickers of stocks that
Are in his personal portfolio on the commodity side uh that have his attention he likes the most right now so he went through and provided I don’t know probably you know 10 precious metals stock 10 stocks 10 energy stocks um other mining stocks he shared one or two agricultural plays
Um so if you’re looking for you know a good place to get started that is a great place to sort of see where true natural resources investing expert um you know has his attention and if you’re interested in uh in purchasing the replay from that conference uh the URL is wealthyon.com conference
Um and here comes John back in hey John um I also folks just want to recommend a few other newsletters to check out so obviously go to John sub stack and I’ll put up that URL again in a second Jeff Clark who’s been on this program a lot he does
Focuses on precious metals and he has a a free service over at thegoldadvisor.com um and uh so you can go check that out um there’s Lobo Tigre he is a newsletter in fact Jeff he was sort of Jeff’s Mentor when Jeff first got into the space Brian London who’s been on this
Channel runs a really highly respected newsletter it’s been out there forever it’s called gold newsletter so if you go to Gold newsletter.com I also think John Duty still publishes a a Mining stock newsletter as well so there are a bunch out there but those are at least a few
To go check out in addition to John substack um all right John glad we got you back on here we’re over the hour so we’re going to wrap up relatively quickly anyways um let me see if there are any other questions here um uh somebody is asking about um uh
Uh Brent Johnson’s dollar milkshake Theory are you familiar with that yeah generally okay um you know which basically is because of the whole euro dollar market um and the fact there are more dollars outside the US and all that stuff that that you know basically almost mathematically
Um it’s it’s very hard for the world to wean itself off dollars because there’s just not a currency that can step in and and replace you know the volume of dollars that are out there anytime soon um he’s asking if you agree with the theory
Or or not and and uh you know certainly what we’re seeing you know I know I know Brent’s been very busy tweeting you know over the past week as all these dollarization stories have been coming out um and I should probably have him on to
Tell his side of the story but um I’m curious uh what what reaction do you have to the dollar milkshake Theory now with these you know recent developments in play well it that’s kind of how it has worked in the past where whenever there’s trouble in the world
Money flows into the dollar even if we cause the trouble um the dollar still gets stronger because people perceive the U.S to be the the safe haven and the dollar to be the safe haven currency um and there’s a ton of dollar denominated debt out there which
Requires dollars in order to be paid off so yeah there’s huge demand for the dollar and um the the U.S capital markets are by far the the deepest and most liquid in the world so yeah the dollar will continue to be a real thing and it’ll be used in international trade
And it’ll be um you know less than before but still a place where people Park their excess savings and things like that um but the trend will be in the wrong direction so yeah the dollar definitely has um a use case out there it’ll still be
Used there will still be demand but the trend is going against it so you know whether it happens right away if the dollar just falls off the cliff or whether we just have um unacceptably high levels of inflation for a few years and then it falls off equipment who knows
Um but I I think the general Trend now as as we talked about at the beginning of this um is now away from all Fiat currencies including the dollar and towards Commodities and commodity-backed currencies so timing is impossible there will still be probably ups and downs for
The Dollar on the way but the the trend is definitely against not just the dollar with the euro in the end as well and that’s not going to change there’s nothing that can really be done short of some kind of a big war that the US wins to
Turn that Trend in the other direction all right well look um I I hate to wrap it up here we’ve gone uh over the hour so John I gotta let you uh get back to your writings um so as we begin to wrap up here um
John I want to let you just give any parting uh words of advice to folks and again tell them where they can go to your sub stack and what they can expect to get there real quick as John begins to do that folks um we do pull this uh
Live uh you know this the software to be able to record these live out from time to time when we have a breaking story like this and we don’t want to delay getting the information to you by having to edit the video and having it come a
Day or two later or maybe even in the following week um so if you like this format would like to see us do this again on timely topics like this just let me know one way or the other uh in the live comments here um all right so uh John
Um you you have the new sub stack it’s been up and running for a couple of months now from everything I hear uh it’s going gangbusters uh I I subscribe to it and I eagerly await every one of your new postings um for folks that are interested in
Following you and your work is that the place they should go yeah rubino.substack.com and uh yeah it’s been a fun three months it uh actually went live the day you and I did our last interview before this one on January 3rd and since that time it’s been uh you
Know it’s been a nice community that is growing up there and they’re sending in a lot of ideas and I’m kind of running with a lot of them and uh yeah I think the uh the whole actionable um currency crisis portfolio idea is uh is something whose time has come and
That’s what we’re trying to create over there is uh you know exactly which Investments that we should all be in and we’re setting up portfolios where where I own everything that shows up on the portfolio and before I sell it I let anybody know and or let everybody know
On the sub stack so we’re all in it together so right so far so good you’re putting your money where your mouth is literally yeah exactly all right great um well folks there’s the URL to sign up for John substack um uh just a reminder if you want to get
Those Rick’s picks uh go to wealthyon.com conference as I talk about every week on this channel um you know huge part of our mission here is to help people get um become more financially literate but then Empower them by connecting them with resources that can help them put all
These insights into action uh if you’re you know looking for ideas and guidance on how to put a lot of what John talked about today into action your portfolio definitely reach out to your own personal um professional financial advisor if they take into account all the the risks
And issues and macro trends that John talked about here um if they don’t or if you just like a second opinion of one who does feel free to talk to one of the financial advisors endorsed by wealthyon you just go fill out the short form over at wealthyon.com
Um which I have here somewhere oh right up there um wealthyon.com it’s totally free doesn’t cost you anything there’s no commitment to work with these guys uh they’ll just listen to your personal situation give you their advice on what they think you should do and you can go
Take that back to your existing financial advisor if you’re if you’re a do-it-yourselfer you can just take that into account in terms of what you do or if you like those guys you can continue talking with them but they just offer it as a public service to help people be more informed
Um John it’s always great to have you on the channel thanks so much for coming on uh and doing it live here with me especially soldiering through the technical issues that we had there um but really appreciate it and look forward to having you back on the channel soon
Thanks Adam see you all right and everybody else thanks so much for watching
